John of Montecorvino

John of Montecorvino (1247-1328) was a Catholic priest who served as the Archbishop of Khanbaliq in Cathay (now Beijing, China) and founded the earliest Christian missions in India and China. In 1306, he built a church in Khanbaliq (Beijing) and famously wrote to Pope Clement V that he could have converted the Mongol khan if he were given two more followers.

Biography
John was born in 1247 in Montecorvino Rovella, Campania, Italy, and he joined the Franciscan Order of Catholicism, which had concerned itself with converting people to Christianity. In 1272, he was hired by Emperor Michael VIII of Byzantium to talk with Pope Gregory X about reuniting the Catholic and Orthodox churches, and Pope Nicholas IV sent him to the Near East in 1275 to spread Christianity eastward. Kublai Khan, the Khan of the Mongol Empire, was friendly to Christians and allowed missionaries to enter his realm, and in 1289 he was sent as a papal legate to the Mongol Empire and the Ethiopian Empire, and in 1291 he baptized 100 people in Madras, India before establishing a church in Khanbaliq (Beijing) in 1299 in the capital of the Yuan dynasty. John trained 150 boys from ages 7 to 11 to be trained as choir singers, and he translated the New Testament into the Uyghur language. He died in 1328 in Khanbaliq, the only effective European bishop in the city.